It’s been big news in political circles today that the Republicans have released their Pledge to America for what they are going to do when they regain power in November.  Like the Contract with America that came before it, today’s Pledge has a lot of stuff in it that looks like it’s probably about right on.  Like the Contract that came before it, it’s an open question how much the GOP will actually adhere to the Pledge once they actually get back in power.  As a statement of intentions, however, it strikes me as being generally acceptable.  Unfortunately, to me, it seems to leave out two rather important things.

First, and most importantly, is the fact that we already have a pledge to America, and a contract with America as well.  Both documents are one in the same.  We normally call them the Constitution.  Our first and still most important contract between this government and the people it governs seems featured in the Pledge only in the corners and around the fringes, which is a rather disappointing role for the document that is the guiding implementation of American democracy.  I would have liked to see the Constitution feature more prominently, if for no other reason than to help the Republicans make the case that, this time around, they believe in Constitutional fidelity.

Moving in a similar vein, I also had a rather hard time seeing much principle behind the document.  Most of the document seems to focus on undoing the things that Obama and the liberal Democrats have done to us in the past two years.  While that is both good and important, I really didn’t feel much in the way of a true vision for America.  The lack of vision and lack of principle do not inspire in me much confidence that, when it comes time for Republicans to govern, they will stand by their Pledge.

As an exercise in setting a legislative agenda, I’d say the Pledge manages to get that job done well enough.  But as a tool for motivating the conservative base, attracting reluctant Republicans, or inspiring a nation, the Pledge most certainly falls flat on its face.  The Pledge, at over 20 pages, is also disturbingly long to the point that the length tends to dilute the message.

Overall, it’s certainly nothing that I would have written; but if the Republicans, current and future, adhere to it, then I certainly won’t complain.

As the weekend of September 11 draws to a close, it wraps up a week of news coverage reminding us of where we stand as a nation with respect to the enemy that made itself impossible to miss nine years ago.  The results, it seems, have not been pretty.  Aside from the fact that America is still a defender of Israel and the fact that we still exist at all — though, not to worry, the President is working on solving both of those problems as we speak — the terrorists seem to have done pretty well for themselves.  Americans today have fewer liberties than ever, with freedoms taken from us by conservatives and liberals alike, all in the name of national defense.  Our troops are embroiled in a war in Afghanistan, the terrorists’ home turf, under the guidance of a Commander in Chief that says quite strongly by his actions that their fight is little to him but a political distraction.  But the two biggest stories this week tell a story of American weakness and fear which should be music to the ears of the Radical Islamists who seek to do us harm.

The stories of the week about the Muslim world have undoubtedly been the Florida preacher who was for Koran burning before he was against it, and the ongoing saga of the Ground Zero Mosque.  Right from the start, the preacher was attacked by the operatives of the media with story after maligning story about how he shouldn’t be doing what he wanted to do.  A common refrain started by the media was that the act of burning a Koran would be inflammatory to Muslims, and play into the hands of the radicals that seek to do America harm.  This sentiment was picked up by General Petraeus, warning that it might intensify the danger to our troops overseas, which was all that it took to bring the conservative media on-board with the message.  And then, today, I see that the imam who wants to build the Ground Zero Mosque has added not upsetting terrorists to the list of reasons why he can’t possibly build on another location.  If the General says that moving the mosque will hurt our troops, will that make the conservatives upset by the planned location sit down?

At bottom, we know that the imam is only using that excuse because he knows that it works.  Both at home and abroad, Americans are portrayed as being deathly afraid of upsetting anyone in the Muslim world.  We’re warned repeatedly by the President and others that being anything less than respectful Muslims endangers everyone.  After all, we all know that when terrorists get mad, they shoot people, stab people, blow up civilians, or fly planes into buildings; nevermind that they’d be doing those things anyway.  Be afraid, is the message.  Be afraid to fly on airplanes; be afraid that someone might have a bomb in their shoe, be so afraid that we submit ourselves to high tech full body scans just to go from point A to point B.  Be afraid of showing your outrage against the outrageous; don’t call out Islamic haters for being hateful, don’t burn their Koran even as they burn your flag and Bible, don’t question that mosque being built on Ground Zero.  If you do, then they are going to come after you, and your family, and your neighbors, and the country, and the troops, and so on until someone meaningful enough to you turns up, that you’ll be told terrorists will kill, to make you stop doing whatever it is that you wanted to do.

Terrorists fight by instilling fear.  Their goal is to make their enemies so afraid of the consequences of stepping out of line that they will do whatever the terrorists want.

Radical Islam need not conquer us from without; they win when Americans become too afraid to live free.  This week brought us proof that such fear is palpable and strong enough to have a real effect on our behavior.  We are, increasingly, a people at war with ourselves, with our morality, and with our sense of right and wrong.  We’ve allowed ourselves to give up some freedoms, and find ourselves now being asked to surrender even more, all in the hope that the terrorists might calm down.  But they won’t calm down.  Why would they?  They’re winning.

And scoring their biggest victories without even firing a shot.

Tags: terrorism

Making its way around the fringes of the news this weekend is a quiet move by the federal government to begin drawing in additional dollars to the federal treasury.  In technical terms it’s not a tax increase, although the bottom line effect is the same.  The federal government is poised to demand more money from tens to hundreds of thousands of people.  The key to this trick is an interaction between FEMA and the federal flood insurance program which is played subtly, but which has a real effect on the bank accounts of everyday Americans.

The federal flood insurance program is exactly what its name sounds like: A program by the federal government to provide flood insurance to homeowners who choose to live in areas of likely flooding.  The federal government provides this service because no private insurer in their right mind would ever want to.  Like most insurance programs, people insured by the program are required to pay premiums to their insurer (in this case, the federal government) for the privilege of having insurance.  Unlike most insurance programs, however, people are required by law to buy in if they live in a flood zone and have a mortgage backed by the federal government.  As you might imagine, there are a lot of mortgages which fit that description.

FEMA gets involved because they are the government agency which is responsible for determining what counts as a flood zone in the United States.  They do this by making maps.  The FEMA maps take into account several features which affect whether or not a location is likely to be flooded and group those findings into zones.  FEMA is currently in the process of updating many of their national flood zone maps.

One of the features which affects an area’s classification is the protection afforded by levees.  Areas which may otherwise be at high risk of flooding may have that risk reduced if they are sufficiently protected.  Making that decision is, of course, FEMA’s job, and FEMA has not been kind to levees during their latest round of map making.  The result is that a number of areas now find themselves with a potentially large increase in flood insurance premiums.

Of course, the story isn’t complete without mentioning one other agency of the federal government, the one responsible for maintaining the levees: The Army Corps of Engineers.  Under their current funding process, getting repairs done within the next few decades is a questionable proposition at best, leaving many communities rather the opposite of high and dry.  Many are now faced with the uncomfortable decision of doing the federal government’s job for them (provided they don’t get sued for trying), or feeding the federal wealth destruction machine.

Either way, the federal government has two basic choices: Spend money to solve a problem, or make money by not solving it.  Easy.

In the news recently is a story, apparently breaking on the technology blog ArsTechnica, suggesting that Congress may soon consider the question of whether or not cell phone manufacturers should be required to include FM radios in all of their devices.¹  Required, as in, Congress is going to pass a law making FM radio receivers mandatory.  Even for this current Congress, where payoffs, bribery, and corruption runs rampant, this entire move is somewhat incredible.

As I understand the story right now, the FM radio mandate is part of a proposed compromise between two special interest groups lobbying hard in Washington over the relatively obscure issue of broadcast radio royalties.  Under current copyright law, radio broadcasters are only required to pay performance royalties to songwriters, not to artists or recording labels, but internet radio broadcasters are required to pay all three.  Suffice it to say, internet radio broadcasters don’t like this scheme because it places them at a competitive disadvantage, and the recording labels and artists don’t like this scheme because they don’t get paid.  Both groups have been lobbying hard in Congress to change the law to force broadcast radio to pay all three royalties; broadcast radio, of course, prefers the current system.

Congress, being Congress, is apparently considering doing what it does best:  Bailing out special interests with payoffs using our money.

In this case, the scheme involves mandating FM radios in cell phones.  Under the deal, broadcast radio would need to pick up the tab for all three royalties, up to a certain monetary cap.  In exchange, Congress will mandate that FM radio receivers be placed in portable devices including cell phones, presumably along with MP3 players and their ilk as well.  In this way, the artists and labels get their money and FM radio gets receivers in more places which should increase the number of listeners.  Everybody wins.

Everybody, that is, except for people who want to buy one of these devices.

It should go without saying that FM receivers don’t come free.  There’s circuitry involved, an antenna, and given the digital nature of most portable electronics, software to be written as well.  It’s difficult to say how much money it would cost to add FM radios to cell phones, but it’s clear from the overwhelming lack of FM-enabled phones that, whatever it costs, it’s more than people would be willing to pay.  But, with a congressional mandate, the people wouldn’t be left with a choice.  Manufacturers will pass along those costs, and consumers will still need to buy cell phones.

The good news is that this so-called compromise appears to still be pretty far away from making its way into law.  For the love of free markets, I hope it stays that way.

1. Ars, so far, appears to be the only one with this story, with other sources around the Internet simply referring back to their article.  As someone who follows their blog, I have generally found their technology-related writing to be accurate, so I’m inclined to believe that their post reflects something that is actually happening.  Even so, the lack of other sources is worth noting. [↩]

Tags: free markets

I was recently linked to an article by Ann Coulter which offers her take on the legal history of the citizenship of illegal alien born babies under the 14th Amendment.  Her article is interesting, and quite possibly the most reasonably presented argument I’ve seen from her.  The essence of her article is to point out that anchor babies — children born of illegal aliens on US soil which illegal aliens can use as an “anchor” to tie themselves to the US — are the product of a misunderstanding about the meaning of the 14th Amendment.  As she points out, the question whether the Citizenship Clause would apply to the children of aliens came up at the time the Clause was drafted, and rejected by its author.  Unfortunately, the history on this point is not so clear as she would cause us to believe, and is, in any case, irrelevant to the text of what the 14th Amendment actually says.

The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment states:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside

This clause has two essential parts.  In the first, it identifies a group of people (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”) and then grants that group citizenship.  The essential question is whether or not the children of illegal immigrants are part of the identified group of people.  Based on the text and structure of the Clause, it is apparent that they are.

The part of the Clause that identifies the group is a conjunction of two separate conditions.  To qualify, you must be a person “born or naturalized in the United States.”  Anchor babies, by their very definition, are “born … in the United States,” so they pass this first test.  Having been born in the United States, you then must be “subject to the jurisdiction [of the United States].”  If there is a reason to believe that illegal aliens are not subject to US jurisdiction, it is difficult to imagine what that reason might be.  Illegal aliens are generally expected to obey US law, are subject to arrest, and can be imprisoned — all classic indicators that illegal aliens, while in the country, are subject to US jurisdiction.

However, as Ann Coulter points out:

The very author of the citizenship clause, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, expressly said: “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”

She takes that statement as evidence that, when it comes to conferring citizenship on aliens, illegals’ babies need not apply, because the author of the Clause himself was sure that it would not be so.  Her basic argument has two flaws.  First, it is entirely possible that the Clause’s author wrote something that he did not intend; if so, that’s unfortunate, but it is the text, not the author’s intent that controls.  Second, and more importantly, his words do not say what Ms. Coulter takes them to mean.  Senator Howard is not talking about illegal alien babies; he’s talking about “aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”

In the constitutional analysis, the difference between illegal alien babies and foreign ambassador babies is important.  Foreign ambassadors, by diplomatic tradition and legal history, do not normally become subject to the jurisdictions wherein they perform their official duties.  This fact is the basis of diplomatic immunity, which ambassadors enjoy along with their families who join them during their travels.  For Senator Howard to say that the Citizenship Clause does not apply to “the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers,” he is not saying anything that isn’t clear from the Clause’s text.  Because they are not “subject to the jurisdiction [of the United States],” they are not part of the group that enjoys automatic citizenship.  Illegal aliens, however, have no diplomatic immunity, or any foreign immunity of any kind.  That fact leaves them in the automatic citizenship group and leaves us with anchor babies.

Ms. Coulter’s other examples of who falls into the group and who doesn’t break down along similar lines.  Native Americans are out because they are under tribal rather than US jurisdiction.  Legal immigrants are in because they have crossed into and, thus, subjected themselves to US jurisdiction.  And she finishes with a tale of welfare state horribles that have nothing to do with the constitutional question at hand.

Although it would be nice if the existence of anchor babies rested entirely on a misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment, that is, unfortunately, not the case.  By its plain terms, if you are born in the US and subject to US jurisdiction, you’re automatically a citizen.  Because babies born to illegal aliens on US soil meet both criteria, their citizenship is constitutionally guaranteed.

Tags: 14th Amendment, constitution, immigration

This afternoon, a federal judge in Arizona granted a preliminary injunction against portions of the Arizona immigration law, SB 1070.  Although the federal government had asked for the entire law to be struck down, the judge declined to grant an injunction against the law in its entirety.  That is not, however, anything close to a win for Arizona or the American people; it simply means that the law was killed surgically, rather than with a blunt instrument.  Reading through the ruling itself, it appears that the judge completely bought into the federal government’s preemption argument, but largely failed to make a convincing case for why its ruling is correct.  What follows are my first impressions on select parts of the ruling.

Standing

I have wondered since I first heard that the US government was suing Arizona how the federal government would justify standing to bring forth its lawsuit.  In making her ruling, the judge offered no insight as to how she found the federal government to have standing.  Though I wasn’t surprised by this — neither side briefed the issue (that I saw) and nobody (I’ve seen) has asked this question besides me — I was disappointed.

The question of preemption is fundamentally a question of which law applies to a particular case.  In the normal preemption case, a party is challenged under a state law, and mounts a defense saying that the state law is preempted by federal law.  If the state law and federal law conflict, the Supremacy Clause dictates that federal law must win, meaning that the state law is preempted.  The conflict can either be direct, in the sense that the federal law and state law say two incompatible things, or the preemption could be made by rule, if the federal government affirmatively prevents the states from legislating in a given area.  Regardless of how preemption happens, the party harmed was always the person or entity against whom the state law would apply if not for preemption.

Today, without any discussion, the judge has necessarily found that the federal government is itself harmed when a state passes a law which is incompatible with federal law.  While it’s possible that I’ve missed something about how standing works, this (implicit) theory of standing seems incredible to me.  Last I checked, the federal government doesn’t have a free-standing license to challenge any state law that it doesn’t like.

Of course, for the sake of fairness, I should note that it’s at least plausible that the federal government could claim to be harmed by the “burden” Arizona would place on it by running immigration checks and referring illegal aliens to ICE for processing.  However, that only opens the door to some of the challenges posed to the Arizona law, not to the entire thing.

Section 2b

In striking down this section, the judge makes much of a drafting error made in the original SB 1070 and later corrected in a subsequent amendment passed in short succession.  The judge is quick to criticize the second sentence of this section, which says that “[a]ny person who is arrested shall have the person’s immigration status determined before the person is released.”  In the law, as amended, this naturally follows the preceding sentence which says what Arizona law enforcement must do “[f]or any lawful stop, detention or arrest.”  The judge, however, refused to read the two sentences as a cohesive whole because the original unamended SB 1070 spoke only of “lawful contact,” rather than of “lawful stop, detention or arrest.”  There is little reason to doubt that the Arizona legislature intended both forms of that sentence to mean the same thing, and that the amendment was made to clear up the obvious vagueness of what “lawful contact” actually entails.  The judge, however, would apparently hold the two phrases to mean something so radically different that the second sentence and first sentence should be read as if they are in entirely separate sections, despite the absurd result that analysis produces.

Section 5

In striking down this section, the judge turns established precedent squarely on its head.  She begins with the following observation:

“States possess broad authority under their police powers to regulate the employment relationship to protect workers within the State.” De Canas, 424 U.S. at 356. Interpreting De Canas and considering a state law sanctioning employers who hire unauthorized workers, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that, “because the power to regulate the employment of unauthorized aliens remains within the states’ historic police powers, an assumption of non-preemption appli[ed].” Chicanos Por La Causa I, 544 F.3d at 984; accord Wyeth v. Levine, 129 S. Ct. 1187, 1194-95 (2009) (observing that “[i]n all pre-emption cases, and particularly in those in which Congress has legislated . . . in a field which the States have traditionally occupied, . . . we start with the assumption that the historic police powers of the States were not to be superseded by the Federal Act unless that was the clear and manifest purpose of Congress” (internal quotations and citation omitted)).

Having read that paragraph, it would appear that the viability of a law limiting illegal aliens from applying for or performing work should be an easy win for Arizona.  Arizona’s law is, after all, directly on point with the above cited cases.  By the end of the section, however, the judge has talked herself into the exact opposite conclusion.  The linchpin: Arizona attaches a penalty to violating its law.

Although I haven’t read the cited precedent, I find it highly unlikely that the cases above involved state laws with no penalty for non-compliance.  After all, police powers are rather meaningless if the police have no power to enforce them.

Section 6

In sum, this section amounts to unconstitutionality by virtue of hopelessly confusing federal policy.  The essence of the judge’s conclusion on this section is that it is simply too hard for Arizona police to know what is and isn’t a removable offense, so that “there is a substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens.”

Although I find it illogical to say that this law is preempted as opposed to, say, that it is unconstitutionally vague, I find it hard to fault the judge too deeply for her outcome on this point.  From everything I understand, the entire concept of a “removable offense” is, truly, a mess.  Nobody really knows whether or not an offense mandates removal of the alien until the final appellate court has its say.  This is an area where Congress really should step up and add some much needed clarity to the law.

Conclusion

Overall, the quality of the ruling strikes me as being pretty bad.  The key through it all, however, is that the court bought the federal government’s argument of preemption and ran with it to every area of the law where it was necessary to strike the law down.  The ruling, however, leaves open some important questions which should be addressed in a final ruling on the merits at some point in the future.

Tags: court opinions, immigration

Recent legal news has begin to cover a troubling change beginning to play at the edges of American law.  In New Jersey, the state’s court of appeals set aside a shocking ruling from one of the state’s trial courts which would have held that a man who abused and sexually violated his wife because “he was operating under [Islamic religious] his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to.”  The court of appeals, in no uncertain terms, properly held the trial court’s opinion to be inconsistent with both New Jersey and federal law.  This case, however appropriately it appears to have turned out, appears, to me, to raise a significant problem for the left.

It goes virtually without saying that the interest in merging Sharia law with US law is an exercise being undertaken exclusively by leftists.  Britain, of course, has actual Sharia courts, established as arbitration tribunals, which hear cases and issue rulings which have the force of law.  In other European nations, national courts have occasionally ruled consistent with Sharia principles despite national laws which point in the opposite direction.  France, though they haven’t got Sharia courts, do have a Sharia tax code which aims to deal with some of the peculiarities of Islamic financial management.  The US, so far, has only rogue judges in liberal states.

So far, Sharia courts and Sharia-related court decisions have all been based on one of three general legal categories: probate, equity, and domestic violence.  It is the cases of domestic violence which are most troubling, and the case in New Jersey illustrates precisely why.

In the New Jersey case, as mentioned, a man raped his wife on multiple occasions under the belief that it was his right, as her husband, to do so.  Had he done that even 35 years ago, it would not have been a crime in the US.  However, as of 1993, spousal rape became a crime in every corner of the United States at the urging of the feminist movement.  In addition to US law, spousal rape is identified in the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, Article 2(a) as a form of violence against women.  There is, I think it is safe to say, a solid consensus which sweeps broadly against ideological lines that cannot tolerate the behavior that took place in New Jersey.  As the self-declared champions of women’s rights, women’s equality, and the fight to end violence against women, it would seem that the left has a vested interest in making sure that no woman is ever raped by her husband ever again.

The stakes, however, go even beyond the question of spousal rape in Islamic marriages.  From what I have been able to find of the trial judge’s logic, it appears to be relatively unbounded.  If the touchstone of the judge’s ruling is the “belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to,” what about that is so closely bounded to Islam that it could not be applied elsewhere?  After all, that was everyone’s belief — and the law — until 1975, meaning most of America grew up in a country where there was no such thing as spousal rape.  And even further, what if I find that it is my belief as a man my “desire to have sex when and whether [I want] to” with anyone that I please?  There would be no such thing as rape, if only I didn’t believe in it.

Rulings like one in New Jersey place the left on a collision course with itself.  It is simply not possible to champion women’s rights and a culture which systematically represses and does violence to women at the same time.  But perhaps the thought that they might even try is part of the reason that the left, right now, has a woman problem.  I, for one, would rather see them win some women back than bury the rest of us under Islamic law.

Tags: court opinions, logic, racial politics, sharia law

With Obama having now signed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill into law, it’s worth pausing for a moment or two to wonder what, exactly, might have been the point.  For most of us out here in the country at large, the main thing that we want from this bill (ignoring, for a moment, that most of us don’t want this bill) is to know that the economy is never again going to go into a tailspin the way it did in 2008.  Even though nobody knows how the law works, we can at least be sure that it will prevent another economic breakdown.  Indeed, thousands of pages should be more than enough to ensure that another economic crisis won’t ever come up again.  The best news is, we’ll find out if it worked as soon as another crisis happens.

Fortunately, it seems that the next crisis may not be too long in coming.  Though nobody can predict a crisis with certainty, it does appear that the country is on a dangerous ledge.  Even Dodd says so.  But with the bill in place, we can at least be secure in the knowledge that we will be able to find out, through the course of the crisis, how well law prevents the next crisis from occurring.

If that seemed like it was worded awkwardly, it’s because the concept itself is awkward.  According to Dodd, we can only know how well the bill works when the next crisis hits.  But the supposed point of the bill is to prevent another economic crisis from ever occurring.  The tautology is fascinating, because between Dodd and Obama, we know for a fact that the only thing this bill can do is fail.

Of course, the open secret about te bill is the fact that it has nothing to do with actually preventing another crisis. In truth, Obama and Dodd are probably looking forward to another crisis, in hope of using their new toolkit to extend their stranglehold over American business.

But for ordinary Americans, the key measure of success won’t be whether the government can successfully wind down a bank that’s “too big to fail.” Success to us means having jobs, having an accurate value for our homes and financial investments, having money left after taxes to put in the bank, and having a bank left to put our money into. Nothing in the bill addresses any of those concerns.

Once again, the government has (willfully) missed the point.

Drifting across the Internet this evening, I happened across a rather peculiar story in the LA Times opinion section.  The story is as entertaining as a Sunday drive gone bizarrely wrong; which, when you get right down to it, is pretty close to what the story is all about.

The story, you see, is about the author who was out driving one day when some guy in a mini-van pulled up along side him and told him that he should be listening to talk radio, rather than the old music he was playing instead.  To most of us, of course, this would come as more than a bit of a surprise.  We don’t normally plan to be interrupted from our cocoons of roadway silence except in case of some sort of emergency, and it would be hard to fault the author for finding the whole encounter rather rude.  And so, like any of us in his place might do, the author decides that the best response is to roll up his window and waste an untold amount of his day following and stalking the van.

The author, it seems, had just entered into to the Left’s curious love affair with hate.

To even think about chasing the van out of town should be far enough over the edge for any man to consider, but as he followed the man in the van, his mind seemed to wind down more bizarre back alleys than his car is ever likely to find.  He “tailed the driver of the Caravan as indiscreetly as possible, hoping he’d see me, realize who I was, get nervous, then scared, then terrified, then have a massive coronary and slam into a 300-year-old sycamore.”  A prayer that another man receive the death penalty, simply for suggesting a different station on the radio.  And a murderous prayer that he would be that conservative’s angel of death.

Luckily, in the end, he backs off from his murderous rage, and sets about writing this interesting anecdote for the paper.  No harm, no foul, I suppose.

But what, I wonder, might be the “symptoms of a sick society” which could cause a man who is ideally so tolerant of the opinions of others to chase out of town those opinions which differ from his own.  It certainly isn’t Internet-promoted “democratization [that] leads people to believe that their opinions not only count but must be broadcast at every opportunity.”  Or, who knows, perhaps it is.  A man with a bumper sticker and who actually gets paid when his ideas are broadcast is certainly going to be farther ahead than a man with an old van with power windows.  But no.  The freedom of speech and an open dialogue of political discourse are the light and cleanser which wipe away rage.  The answer, surely, must be something else.

Perhaps, in the end, the author gives us just the hint that we need to find out what the true source of “uranium-enriched behavior” in political society is.  It may simply be the impulse response to chase away disfavored ideas while casting those who express those ideas in a hostile light.  Perhaps it is not “democratization” that is the problem, but the attempt to shut down, thwart, bypass, suppress, chase away, and ram democracy into a 300-year-old sycamore that is really at fault.

Perhaps what we really need to do is put everyone on the Left through classes in anger management.